Sunday, May 17, 2009

Signature Bakery

This highly regarded little cake shop is attached to a hotel near the Fortune Centre (walk up Daye Road towards Women's Street). It's easy to miss, and has a display counter showing black forest cake (黑森林), lemon cheesecake (柠檬之士), opera cake (奥普拉), tiramisu (提拉米苏), and different kinds of mousse (慕斯). There was one cake with the word Sacher on top which the counter girl assured me was genuine Sacher (撒切尔), the classic chocolate/apricot torte. I asked if the cheesecake was New York or Japanese style and she wasn't sure. (Perhaps not a useful question to ask at a supposedly European bakery in China.) I decided to try the Sacher torte and told her to wrap up a piece, thus learning about their minimum two pieces per order policy for takeout. Silly, but I got a piece of the cheesecake as well.

The Sacher torte's construction material had a texture way more like cake than torte and wasn't very chocolatey, but it did have a nice thick layer of chocolate glaze on top that almost made up for that. The deal breaker was the jam between the layers tasting a whole hell of a lot like peaches.

The lemon cheesecake didn't have much lemon flavour but was a passable plain cheesecake. It was a little dry and had a baked, NY style texture but also the layer of sponge cake on top that I associate with Japanese cheesecake. Anyway, Western bakeries here are few and far between so I will probably be back to check on some of their other offerings.

Address: 签名饼屋 盐市口大业路8号华阳花园城大酒店1楼 Just behind Daye Rd bus stop, beside Fortune Centre.

1 comment:

  1. The oatmeal cookies are also worth a try!

